At CES, ASUS showed off its latest workstation motherboard designed for 2P socket LGA2011 Sandy Bridge-EP eight-core processors, the Z9PE-D8-WS. By the looks of it, it might not be having the voltage-delivery muscle of EVGA's SR3, but it is filled to the brim with connectivity. Each socket is powered by a 14-phase Digi+ II VRM, there are numerous other power domains. The board draws power from a 24-pin ATX connector, two 8-pin EPS connectors, and a 4-pin Molex.

The sockets are each wired to four DDR3 DIMM slots, giving this board the ability to hold up to 256 GB of RAM. There are seven PCI-Express 3.0 x16 expansion slots, from which four (blue) are x16 capable, and three (black) x8 capable. There are as many as 10 SATA ports, of which six appear to be 6 Gb/s capable. In terms of connectivity, an ASpeed AST2300 provides basic display and management over IP functions; there are two gigabit Ethernet interfaces driven by Intel-made controllers, two USB 3.0 ports, 8-channel HD audio, and a number of USB 2.0 ports. ASUS demonstrated this board by running two 2P capable unknown processors, three latest NVIDIA Tesla GPU compute cards, and an ASUS-made graphics card. Unlike with EVGA SR3, which is technically a workstation motherboard designed for enthusiasts, the Z9PE-D8-WS is intentioned to be a workstation motherboard only.

256GB/8 slots = 32 GB/slot. To my knowledge, the highest available RAM density available to most consumers is 8 GB/stick. Supposedly Samsung has 32 GB/stick, but that stuff seems to be available in only extremely limited quantities (not mentioning the king's ransom eight sticks of it would require).

Oh well, if you're already dropping 2 grand on a set of processors, ~800 on the mobo (assumed, but only a ballpark guess), and enough on other components (PSU, drives, etc...) to make a dozen high end consumer PCs the cost of a 32 GB stick seems reasonable...

256GB/8 slots = 32 GB/slot. To my knowledge, the highest available RAM density available to most consumers is 8 GB/stick. Supposedly Samsung has 32 GB/stick, but that stuff seems to be available in only extremely limited quantities (not mentioning the king's ransom eight sticks of it would require).